Posts Tagged ‘India’

This is one of the best, concise essays I have seen in defence of universal age pensions. The author, Prabhat Patnaik, is an Indian economist known to be a Marxist, but I see nothing Marxist in this essay. Since the newspaper link may not last long, I have taken the liberty of sharing with TdJ readers an edited version that is about half as long as the original. To download and read the full essay, click on the link below. (more…)

We should start looking at universal health insurance for the elderly, not restricting it to merely BPL [below poverty line] patients, but extending it to the middle-class as well. We need helplines, the establishment of a national trust for the aged and a national commission for senior citizens. Sadly, as a society, we do not care for our elderly and hence the lack of will.

The government needs [also] … to help future generations benefit and live longer … with some sort of a universal pension plan.

Ms. Poonam Muttreja heads the Population Foundation of India (PFI), a New Delhi-based NGO. The Deccan Chronicle is published in Hyderabad (Telangana) and other Deccan regions, including Kerala. The newspaper has more than a million subscribers.

India, in theory if not in practice, provides social (non-contributory) pensions for all residents older than 60 years who live in families poor enough to be listed as BPL (below poverty line). The social pension, known as the “Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension Scheme” (IGNOAPS) provides beneficiaries aged 60–79 a monthly pension of Rs 300 (US$4.60). Those 80 years and older are entitled to monthly benefits of Rs 750 (US$11.50). (more…)

India’s trade unions are calling for a general strike on September 2nd, demanding a minimum pension of about 45 US dollars a month for all workers, formal and informal. The proposed pension is not fully universal, however, as it excludes unpaid workers, such as mothers, housewives and the self-employed.

Demanding universal pension of Rs 3000 [USD 45] per month to every worker, including those engaged in unorganised sector and proper application of labour laws for safe guarding interests of the working class, various trade unions will observe general strike in the country on September 2. In a bid to garner support for the stir, CPM General Secretary Sitaram Yechury has posted a series of tweets on his official page last night … stressing for Rs 3000 pension to all workers, organised and unorganised.

FT journalist Hannah Kuchler explains the challenges that Facebook and Google face in the Indian market. Here is a small sample of her long, informative column.

Silicon Valley companies, led by Google and Facebook, are arriving with the key to a vital resource of the 21st century: connectivity. Wary of some of their tactics and rhetoric, Indian critics have dubbed the US companies “digital colonialists”. ….

Executives from both Google and Facebook talk with missionary zeal about bringing internet access to India’s masses as a way of alleviating poverty, improving education and creating jobs. Yet their motives are complex. Internet companies have the power to shape lives, governments and economies in ways that purveyors of more straightforward consumer goods do not. They often operate in what economists call “winner-takes-all” markets, meaning that, once established, companies benefit from a network effect: the more people who use an app, the more attractive it becomes, leaving little room for local competition. The fate of Facebook’s “Free Basics” app, which was effectively banned by India’s regulator last month, offers a glimpse of the broader battles that could lie ahead, across the developing world, as companies tussle to win the loyalty of billions of future internet users. ….

Facebook’s most high-profile project has been “Free Basics”, a mobile app that is part of the social network’s Internet.org initiative. Facebook uses the app to offer the customers of partner telecoms networks free access to Facebook and a basic selection of other sites such as Wikipedia, BBC News, AccuWeather and health sites. Since its launch in Zambia in 2014, Free Basics has been introduced to 38 countries including India (with Reliance Communications), Kenya (with Bharti Airtel) and Indonesia (with Indosat). The company is also working with telecoms groups to connect more villages to wifi, selling time online through neighbourhood entrepreneurs. It, too, has an aerial project: building solar-powered drones to connect remote areas. ….

The activists [opposing “Free Basics”] argued that telecoms companies should not be able to provide some sites or apps for free while charging for all other internet use, because by doing so they would create a two-tier system of access to the internet.

Researchers find further evidence that private schools in India produce equal or better results at vastly lower costs compared to government schools.

We present experimental evidence on the impact of a school choice program in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (AP) that featured a unique two-stage lottery-based allocation of school vouchers that created both a student-level and a market-level experiment. This design allows us to study both the individual and the aggregate effects of school choice (including spillovers). We find that private-school teachers have lower levels of formal education and training than public-school teachers, and are paid much lower salaries. On the other hand, private schools have a longer school day, a longer school year, smaller class sizes, lower teacher absence, higher teaching activity, and better school hygiene. After two and four years of the program, we find no difference between the test scores of lottery winners and losers on math and Telugu (native language). However, private schools spend significantly less instructional time on these subjects, and use the extra time to teach more English, Science, Social Studies, and Hindi. Averaged across all subjects, lottery winners score 0.13s higher, and students who attend private schools score 0.23s higher. We find no evidence of spillovers on public-school students who do not apply for the voucher, or on students who start out in private schools to begin with, suggesting that the program had no adverse effects on these groups. Finally, the mean cost per student in the private schools in our sample is less than a third of the cost in public schools. Our results suggest that private schools in this setting deliver (slightly) better test score gains than their public counterparts, and do so at substantially lower costs per student. [Emphasis added.]

Malnutrition continues to be a serious problem in India. Yale economist David Atkin shows that internal migration contributes to this because migrants have strong cultural preferences for foods of their place of origin, foods that are typically more expensive than local foods in their new place of residence.

This paper sets out to answer a simple question: do food cultures matter in an economic sense, and in particular, can culture constrain caloric intake and contribute to malnutrition? I address this question by exploiting the fact that migrants and non-migrants face the same relative prices, yet possess very different preferences. Drawing on detailed household survey data from India, I find that inter-state migrants consume fewer calories per Rupee of food expenditure compared to their non-migrant neighbors. This caloric tax on migrants corresponds to 1.6 percent of caloric intake and is evident even for households on the edge of malnutrition. I then provide a chain of evidence in support of an explanation based on culture: that migrants make nutritionally-suboptimal food choices due to strong preferences for the favored foods of their origin states. First, I document that migrants bring their origin-state food preferences with them when they migrate and that these preferences are stronger when there are more migrants in the household. Second, I show that the heterogeneity in the size of the migrant caloric tax is related to the suitability and intensity of these origin-state food preferences. The most adversely affected migrants (households in which both husband and wife migrated to a village where their origin-state preferences are unsuited to the local price vector) would consume 7 percent more calories if they possessed the same preferences as their neighbors

The government of India is moving toward universal age pensions, by extending coverage of social pensions to all who are not specifically excluded through pre-determined criteria, but much remains to be done. And the pension is tiny, even by the standards of India.

The Government is all set to take its first step towards universalisation of pension for aged, widows and disabled as it would remove the distinction of BPL [below poverty line] and APL [above poverty line] for selection of beneficiaries in the 12th Five Year Plan.

The proposal which has huge financial implications has been pushed by activists Aruna Roy and Baba Adhav alongwith many grassroot organisations.

Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh today said that pensions would now be given on the basis of some exclusion critieria in the Socio Economic Census that is going on. ….

It may include now people who may be having single storeyed concrete houses, or a vehicle and so on. The schemes under the Rural Development Ministry now provide a pension of just Rs 200 [US$3.63] a month while the states complement this with more funds.

A large percentage of India’s elderly face abuse from their sons, rather than daughters-in-law, with financial dependence being one of the main reasons for neglect and abuse. While the government gives a paltry monthly pension of Rs.200 [US$3.80] to those over 60 years in BPL [Below Poverty Line] families, social activists are fighting for raising this to Rs.2,000 [US$38] a month for all the elderly, irrespective of economic background. A survey conducted by HelpAge India on elder abuse indicates that the elderly suffer abuse silently – mostly at the hands of their sons.

“There is a common belief that only daughters-in-law abuse elders. On the contrary, 56 percent of those surveyed felt it was their sons who abuse them; daughters-in-law scored as low as 23 percent,” Mathew Cherian, chief executive of HelpAge India, told IANS. …. The report is based on a survey across 20 major cities, with a sample size of 5,600 and 280 elders per city. ….

“Nearly 33 percent of them are living without their children. Around 22 million widows, a fairly large group, have no form of subsistence. The widow’s pension reaches only about 10 percent of the widows,” said Cherian. ”Overall, the situation of the elderly in the country is very bleak,” he added. Financial burden is one of the main reasons for the neglect and abuse. Experts say universal old age pension would help the elders in a big way.